Trusting God Through the Pain

The other day I was listening to a song and a spot in the lyrics took me back to how I used to live my life for a long time, only up to a few years ago:

"Drinking coffee black as iron

And I couldn’t be much higher

Without falling out of my chair

Been so numb for so many years"

-"By and By," Caamp

I started smoking pot when I was in ninth grade, but it wasn't until my senior year of high school that I discovered weed seemed to work really well to mask the feelings of anxiety and depression that I was struggling with back then. When I began having trouble falling asleep at night because of all the negative thoughts running through my brain, it didn't take long for me to find that getting high before bed would help me fall asleep.

The thing I quickly realized though was that escape was only temporary. Sure, I could get high as a kite and fall asleep, but when I awoke the next morning, those same thoughts were still there. When faced again with those things I was running from, I immediately wanted to smoke myself into a stupor again so I could get that temporary relief. It didn't take long before this turned into a habit.

This pattern is what creates addiction, and although I was "wise" enough to stay away from the really dangerous drugs, I most definitely became dependent on weed and alcohol for a large part of my life because I allowed myself to become a slave to this avoidance cycle. This was not a picture of freedom. This was a picture of bondage.

I finally began to see this way of "living" was not sustainable when I went through an extremely hard season of life about seven years ago. At that time, I hit the lowest point that I had felt since my senior year of high school, and all that anxiety and depression I felt in high school came flooding back, like it never actually went away...because it hadn't.

When I hit that point, I remember realizing that I couldn't live this way anymore. I wanted to be free for once in my life. I just didn't know how to get there on my own.

As I continued to walk through that season, I repeatedly asked God to take away the pain of the past, because it just wouldn't leave me alone. I'll never forget when I was praying one day as I struggled through a panic attack, "Why do I have to go through this Lord?" I'll never forget the response I heard within my soul when I heard him say back to me, "Because you can."

I was actually upset with God for that answer to prayer. Why? Because I wanted to be airlifted out of my pain and suffering. I wanted a quick fix, and he hadn't offered that to me. I wanted immediate relief, but what the Lord wanted for me was to learn to trust him, even when life didn't make sense.

I knew that God was telling me that I was going to have to do a lot of hard work to find the freedom I desired, but I knew I could trust him. He was showing me that despite what I thought about myself back then, I actually WAS strong enough to walk through the pain, instead of running from it. That's when I told God, "I trust you Lord, and whatever you want me to do, I'll do it," and my life hasn't been the same since.

I began the hard work, not of earning freedom from God, but of fighting against myself and the years and years of avoidance tactics I had built up to that point. I had to learn how to communicate with those around me. I had to learn that it wasn't freedom to tune out the world and run away from something that was easier to avoid.

The pain is there to point us to something deeper, often false beliefs we have about ourselves and our identity. God doesn't want us to run away from those things, because he wants to use them to show us the truth about who we are to him. Often, I think we have to experience these difficult things in life because he can't heal something inside of us that we aren't aware of. Trials bring impurities to the surface. It exposes them.

When we are properly rooted in Christ, and we are anchored in the truth of his word, we can find the freedom to view our present suffering and afflictions as growth opportunities, rather than reasons to retreat from life. Paul talked about this idea in the book of Romans actually:

"We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation," -Romans 5:3-4 NLT.

The unique thing for us all is not if we will go through pain and suffering, but when. The question for us then is, how will we respond to it?

God doesn't cause evil in the world, but he allows it for now, and he walks through it with us, even when it hurts.

Jesus' life was the ultimate picture of God experiencing the pain and sorrows of our world, even death on a cross.

When we learn to trust him in the pain and walk with him anyway, that trust continues to grow, and we are made to be more like Christ. This is what sanctification looks like, and this is the walk we are called to as we follow Christ in this life. It's what it looks like to "carry our cross" (Luke 9:23) and follow Jesus. When we truly do this and stop allowing ourselves to be led by our own emotions and follow him, we experience true freedom.

'To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,"' -John 8:31-32 NIV.

The impact of our past

"When difficult emotions come up, we may find ourselves retreating from their true significance. Troubled and agitated by their intensity, we just want to make the feelings go away. It's hard to think about our pain. So we might eat, shop, exercise, seek out addictions of various kinds, and---above all---stay busy. The net result is poor self-reflection skills; we lack the ability to come up with any real sense of our feelings, let alone why we are behaving in certain ways. And, of course, this lack of awareness limits our ability to communicate in our marriage.

God created us to have emotions, not get rid of them. Ignoring our feelings can literally make us sick. I have seen a number of people in my office who came to counseling for various reasons. While hearing their stories, I discovered they suffered from chronic illnesses. Many times these clients routinely ignored their feelings. As they became aware of their emotions and learned to process them, they were surprised to see their health improve. Suppressed feelings are the cause of more illness than anyone realizes. Holding emotions inside without ever releasing them is hard on the body.

Some of us, however, grew up in homes where positive thinking was the rule. There is nothing wrong with positive thinking unless it means we can't deal with our negative feelings. Perhaps you grew up with "Look on the bright side," "Ignore it and it wil go away," or even "Rejoice always." These simple answers do little to help our souls, because some feelings linger and even intensify long after the cause has passed. As you may have found, emotions won't just go away."

-How We Love, Chapter 16: Seek Awareness, Milan and Kay Yerkovich

This is a great book that has been extremely helpful in my own journey of learning how negative emotions and behavior patterns can affect communication in our relationships. While reading this section this morning, I found it extremely relatable to my own story, as it was a pattern I've played out most of my life, up until the last 6 years or so. 

I have come to believe that developing a willingness to engage with our emotions is crucial as a starting point for growing in our relationships with others, and with God. I would not stop there though, as I don't think it's enough to simply be aware of how we feel, or even to be willing to talk about it instead of running away from negative thoughts and emotions.

At the end of the day, how helpful is it to simply replay past events and acknowledge how those things made me feel if I don't go any further with it? The reality is that it's not the past event that shapes us, those things led us to believe things about ourselves that are often not true. The reason we often get stuck in these cyclical behavior patterns in our relationships is because current events that may feel similar to something that happened in our past trigger beliefs that are lying beneath the surface, and we feel it all again, whether we acknowledge it or not.

One of the things that has amazed me is how many people simply do not want to engage with their past, even if they encounter someone who has found tremendous amounts of healing from their past. Many people have built incredible defense mechanisms that they simply do not want to get rid of. This is how I lived my life for years though, but that's because I didn't know any better for the longest time. Once I learned that those emotions that I tried so hard to bury for so long are the key to unlocking the doors to the beliefs behind them, and that God wanted to show me the truth in those beliefs, I could never go back to how I used to live.

In one sense I would think that a person who has encountered the healing power of Jesus to be true in their life would be more willing to engage with difficult things in their past, I also have come to believe that Christians often find a new excuse with their new identity as a believer, to pretend like the things of the past didn't happen or didn't affect them the way they truly did. Christians may often use their new identity in Christ as a way of dismissing everything unpleasant in the past and trying to wipe the slate clean without actually dealing with the aftermath of past events. Christians especially love to quote platitudes and use scriptures out of context to justify emotional avoidance. There's probably an endless supply of believers who have misquoted Philippians 3 as a way to justify their repeated ignoring of whatever is in their past.

I have heard the saying many times that we should let sleeping dogs lie, which is just really another way of trying to avoid dealing with something in the past, "just leave it alone," they mean to say! Someone close to me recently said about this saying that it didn't work for them, because the dog was really never asleep, it was barking and growling the whole time. We can pretend that the things of the past didn't affect us. We can escape through various addictions, but all of those things are short-term Band-Aids for the pain that we feel from lies we have believed based on our past experiences.

Jesus doesn't want to simply erase our past, he wants to restore it by teaching us who we truly are in him. He wants to show us that the lies we believed about ourselves in relation to our identity, were never true in the first place, and we can find our true identity in him. My experience has shown this to be true. My life has been completely changed by engaging with the past and letting it draw me closer to my Savior Jesus. Although I believe God can simply wipe that pain away, I think it's generally more true that he wants us to walk through the pain and learn about how it has impacted our relationship with him first, before he restores it. After all, how can he heal what we don't know is there? Jesus is there wanting to show us how much he loves us and who we truly are, but we have to be willing to open the door to let him in. Sometimes, it can feel like a long painful process to even find the door to be able to open it for him, but I can personally attest that it is so worth it when we encounter him in those most painful moments and beliefs that we have been carrying for so long.

Daniel's resolve

This morning in my daily Bible reading, I am reading about the classic account of Daniel and the Lion's den (Daniel chapter 6). If you're not familiar with this story, let me give you a little background information first. 

Daniel was a Jewish exile currently residing in Babylon. He was among several Jewish men who were drafted into the king's service in Babylon. One of the first things we read about Daniel that reveals his character, is that even though as a King's servant he was going to be subject to eating and drinking certain foods from the royal kitchen, the Bible says:

"But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way," -Daniel 1:8 NIV.

This may seem odd to us how someone could be defiled by what they eat or drink, but the Jewish people had very specific dietary laws and what they ate and drink mattered greatly to them. We are getting a very clear picture here of Daniel's integrity and character. When up against a situation where he could have been killed for refusing to comply with the rules and guidelines of the royal service, the Bible says that Daniel resolved to not defile himself this way. That word resolve means, "to make a firm decision about." Daniel knew that even though it could cost him his life, he was going to stand on his principles and beliefs and not be shaken by what was in front of him, no matter what. This is one of the things that made Daniel such a great man of God. 

As the book of Daniel continues, we see him be used by God in multiple ways that are very consequential. He interprets dreams for the king, again at the potential risk of his own life because of what the interpretations meant, but he stands his ground anyways. Daniel knew that although his occupation was in service of a regional king, that his true king was God himself. Daniel knew that no matter what happened or what was going on around him, God was in control, and he had nothing to fear ultimately.

With all of this in mind, I am not at all surprised when I read chapter 6 in the book of Daniel, which is where we find the account of the Lion's den. In this account, we find Daniel in service to a new king, but his integrity and character remain unchanged and solid in his devotion to God. When the chapter starts out, we see Daniel being set apart for a position of high leadership in the kingdom because of how he has conducted himself with integrity:

"Now Daniel so distinguished himself among the administrators and the satraps by his exceptional qualities that the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom," -Daniel 6:3 NIV.

Because of this, a group of other government administrators are extremely jealous of him and are plotting to find a way to take him down. The problem is though, Daniel is just too good of a person and too devoted to God: 

"Finally these men said, “We will never find any basis for charges against this man Daniel unless it has something to do with the law of his God," Daniel 6:5 NIV.

These corrupt officials go on to trick the king into enacting a new law that would essentially force the death penalty on anyone who prays to a god or person other than the king in the next 30 days. Obviously, they craft this law specifically with Daniel in mind because of his devotion to God, they are absolutely confident that he will continue in prayer anyways, and they were absolutely right:

"Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before," -Daniel 6:10 NIV.

Isn't it remarkable, that even in the face of what seemed like certain death, Daniel does not waver one bit in his faith in God. I wonder how often we have the sort of faith and resolve that Daniel has in this situation? I wonder how often, we have the sort of thinking that expects out of our service to God that things should just go a certain way in our life. We may not say it like that, but I think if I'm being honest about myself here, sometimes we definitely think that way. When the chips are down, we often express our frustration with God because things aren't going the way we think they should. 

In Daniel's case though, he knew that God was real, and no matter what was going on in front of him he was going to live his life in full submission to whatever God was asking him to do, even if it cost him everything. As the rest of this story plays out, we see that the king actually really loves Daniel and is extremely disturbed when he realizes he was duped by the other officials into signing this law, and he tries everything to save Daniel, but ultimately has to honor the fact that he signed this law into existence and Daniel is thrown into the lion's den. God sends an angel and closes the mouths of the lions overnight, and when King Darius runs to the Lion's den the next morning he finds Daniel alive and well testifying to God's goodness, which flows into King Darius and he writes a proclamation for all the people of the land to worship Daniel's God. How remarkable! 

One thing I think we have to be careful of is taking the ending of this account as a prescription for how God should manage our lives. The reality is that not every account ends with a happy ending. When Daniel made decisions to stand firm in his faith and service to God he knew that it was at the potential cost of his life, and he stood firm in his decision to serve God and God alone anyhow. We have to always remember that God is the one who sees everything and who is ultimately in control. When we know who God is we can take comfort and knowing that even if we give our lives for his sake, we don't have to worry because we can trust him and we know that death is not the end on this earth. We can be confident in who God is by spending time with him by reading his word and in communicating with him through prayer, and also by being in community with other believers with the same values as us. 

Living in a world that is broken and tainted by sin can be very difficult at times. The challenge for us as believers in Jesus Christ is not to trust in our own strength and circumstances, but to place our full trust in the one who created everything. No matter how the storms may be raging around us, we can know that he loves us, and he has our best interests in mind in all circumstances, and that he is in control of everything in this world. When our faith is grounded in such wonderful knowledge, we can be confident that even if it costs us everything, a life lived in service to God is the one worth living.